Issue Date: August 18, 2002

In this article
"Never give up" -- Frederick Douglass IV
Brief account of the Atlantic slave system

The case for reparations
As the cause reaches national prominence, culminating in this weekend's planned march in Washington, a renowned Harvard Law School professor presents the merits of his argument for redressing the past wrongs of slavery.
By Charles J. Ogletree Jr.
Ogletree, a criminal law specialist, is the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard University.

Cover painting by Jacob Lawrence, Panel 10 from his "Migration" series (1940-41).

The story of African slaves and their descendants in America is one of history's worst injustices. No other group has been forced to endure what slaves did. Beginning in the early 1600s, millions of Africans were brought to this country against their will, auctioned off like cattle, kept in bondage and forced to perform hard labor under the most wicked of institutions. As many as 25 million lives were lost. This atrocity was compounded by the U.S. government's resistance to issue even a formal apology in the 139 years since slavery was abolished.

Now a number of events indicate the government's willingness to acknowledge and remedy past wrongs. In 1988, a bipartisan Congress agreed to pay each aggrieved Japanese American $20,000 as a result of their forced internment during World War II. More recently, the U.S. government reached a consent decree with a class of more than 20,000 black farmers to compensate for years of discrimination by the Department of Agriculture. The case represents the largest civil-rights settlement ever, with a likely compensation of $1 billion. The judge in that case began his opinion with "Forty acres and a mule," the phrase that has become synonymous with African-American reparations. In each instance, the government waived its immunity from suit, lifting the bar that ordinarily prevents a sovereign state from being taken to court. That is important because it provides even more momentum to the case for reparations.

Compensation claims, until recently, were marginalized as goals of radicals and fringe groups. However, the effort gained ground after last year's U.N. Conference Against Racism issued a document defining slavery as "a crime against humanity." The case has reached a fever pitch, culminating in this weekend's planned "Millions for Reparations" march in Washington. Since spring, two class-action lawsuits have been filed in the Northeast, and there is one in South Africa focusing on international claims of reparations related to the apartheid regime.

The Reparations Coordinating Committee, of which I am a co-chairman, plans to file an unprecedented reparations lawsuit in the coming months that could amount to trillions of dollars. In the single largest reparations settlement involving blacks in America to date, the Florida Legislature approved in 1994 the payment of $2 million to survivors of the Rosewood race riots of 1923. Our committee was formed in 1999, shortly after the release of Randall Robinson's galvanizing book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks. We have spent the last two years engaged in legal research and identifying a number of potential defendants such as government entities, corporations and private institutions. The legal team includes civil rights lawyers Adjoa Aiyetoro and Rose Sanders; attorneys Johnnie Cochran, Willie Gary and Dennis Sweet; social scientists Johnetta Cole, Manning Marable and Ronald Walters; and U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., who introduced a bill in 1989 calling for a study of slavery. All work on a volunteer basis.

I first became aware of reparations as a student at Stanford University in the 1970s, when I met Audrey "Queen Mother" Moore, the matriarch of the movement. But it wasn't until years later, when I began to really study slavery and talk with Robinson, my close friend and fellow Harvard Law School graduate, that the issue became personal, and now I've embraced reparations as the most important work of my legal career.

Reparations stem from, but are not limited to, a "breach of contract" between newly freed slaves and the government. The formal period of slavery ended as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed in 1863 by President Lincoln. In January 1865, slaves were promised, among other things, "a plot of not more than (40) forty acres of tillable ground" in Special Field Order No. 15, issued by Gen. William T. Sherman. But three months later, the order was rescinded by President Andrew Johnson, and the government seized the land it already had given to 40,000 blacks in Florida and South Carolina. In the end, four million men, women and children across the nation were freed without a cent.

The root of the word "reparations" is "repair," and it is without question that damage has been done. Of course, African slaves and their descendants are not the only group to suffer in our nation; the Native American, Irish, Italian, Mexican -- almost every minority has been singled out, wronged or discriminated against. The fundamental difference in the case of African Americans is that it was written and enforced law, not just a matter of custom. Equally important is that slavery in America, which existed for nearly 250 years, was followed by an era of legalized discrimination and continuing practices that perpetuate black subordination. The legacy of slavery is seen today in well-documented racial disparities in access to education, health care, housing, employment and insurance, and in the form of racial profiling, the high rate of single-parent homes and the disproportionate number of black inmates.

Bringing the government into litigation will generate a long overdue national debate about slavery. The claim will demonstrate, among other things, the significance of slavery to this country's development, how its benefits extended to every segment of the economy, and how it still adversely affects millions of black Americans.

One major challenge is moving past popular misconceptions. A few years ago, HBO's The Chris Rock Show did a segment on reparations. Rock, whose comedy often deals very directly with race, interviewed people on the streets of New York. He asked blacks in Harlem if African Americans should receive reparations. They answered yes -- and in the millions of dollars. The attitude of whites in Midtown could be summed up with the phrase "Kiss my white butt." Rock struggled to get whites to contribute even one dollar to his personal reparations fund. This vignette is so funny precisely because it presents an accurate picture of what people seem to think African-American reparations are about: blacks asking any and all whites for a handout, and whites telling them where to go.

My own view is compensation shouldn't be in the form of individual checks. It's not designed to benefit the Tiger Woodses and Oprah Winfreys or so many others who have overcome the barriers of institutional discrimination. Instead, a trust fund should administer money received through claims, and an independent commission should distribute those funds to the poorest members of the black community, where damage has been most severe.

But the reparations effort is not solely focused on money. Underlying this movement is a unifying principle we can't continue to ignore: This is about making America better, by helping the truly disadvantaged. For more than a year, we have traveled the world to make the case for reparations, holding presentations in Chicago, Memphis, Detroit and Africa. We have spoken at large conferences as well as small black churches. People are excited and relieved that someone is finally focusing on the fact that in many respects blacks are bottom-stuck to this day. Some symbolic progress has occurred, but there is a growing sense the government has the moral authority and economic resources to address America's problems in a more comprehensive way. African-American reparations can achieve that goal.

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WHAP! ... Silence is broken by a sound meant to conjure the blow of a cowskin whip. ... Whap!

"Covey's job was to break my spirit," Frederick Douglass IV says during a re-enactment of the day his great-great-grandfather fought back against his master. Dressed in an 19th-century black cutaway coat and stovepipe hat, Douglass IV paces the small oval room in the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, his dark eyes fixed on a group of racially mixed high school students. He is tall, with a face full of wiry gray hair that resembles the most famous slave in history. He describes in the first person how the elder Douglass taught himself to read and write before escaping and rising to become a revered abolitionist and presidential adviser. Off to one side, Douglass IV's wife of 29 years, B.J., sings in a soft, soulful way that recalls the aching songs of plantation slaves. The combination is transfixing. When the 50-minute presentation ends, the couple receives a standing ovation.

The message is "never give up," Douglass IV says later. "If I have it in my head to do something, I will go over, under or around to get it done. I'll come down the chimney, if I have to."

One thing Douglass IV, 55, has in his head is to put Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass on reading lists across the country. He says the book, the first of three autobiographies, is a good way for today's youth to learn about the physical and psychological damage of slavery. He gives away 100 copies each month.

On the drive to the presentation, he insists on a hip-hop radio station. "The references to women, to men, to lifestyles, are totally out of bounds," he says about Mystikal and Eminem. But listening to the music helps him relate to teens.

Growing up in Meadville, Pa., Douglass IV was into jazz. It wasn't until his mother was on her deathbed that he decided to devote his life to Douglass' legacy. "She told me not to let the family history die." His first re-enactment was during Black History Month in 1996. Tour buses visited Baltimore's historical sites throughout the day. At Fells Point, he got on a bus and spoke for five minutes. Last year, he quit his job at nearby Morgan State University, his alma mater, to focus on various parts of his Douglass organization and the push for a national museum of black history, now in progress. "People don't have to like me," he says. "Just respect me and the contributions of my people to this country."

Unlike most African Americans, who can trace their history back only a few generations, Douglass IV knows exactly who was responsible for his ancestor's enslavement. Three years ago, he visited Wye House, the former plantation on Maryland's Eastern Shore where Frederick Douglass received his first impressions of slavery. His exchange with the owner's descendants was cordial but brief. "There are still old wounds," he says.

-- Melanie D.G. Kaplan

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Today, virtually all people look upon chattel slavery as wrong, an evil -- although millions of slaves still can be found in the world. But the institution of slavery was perfectly legal and taken for granted for millennia around the globe. Only a tiny minority spoke out against it, beginning in the 1700s.

As far back as the early Middle Ages, the Arabs discovered sub-Saharan Africa was an ideal source for slave labor and began taking millions of slaves to their empires. Numerous small ethnic groups in Africa already owned slaves and had few scruples about selling one another, precisely because tribes such as the Igbo and Mende didn't see themselves as "fellow" Africans.

The Atlantic slave system, as we know it, began in the 1440s, when Portugal started to buy and ship African slaves to Europe, and it ended more than 400 years later, in 1888, with emancipation in Brazil. Slavery was a matter of demand and supply. There was a drastic and continuing shortage of labor throughout the Americas, and Africa provided an almost limitless supply. The resulting trans-Atlantic flow of more than 11 million Africans was invaluable for the rapid development of the New World.

From the 1520s to the 1820s, at least five slaves were absorbed for every white European immigrant. The slaves worked on extremely profitable plantations from Brazil to Maryland, growing sugar, coffee, rice and tobacco for expanding international markets, a precursor to the efficient industrial factory assembly lines. By the early 1800s, there was hardly a business without ties to slavery, even in the North. Slave-produced exports, especially cotton, helped to build New York City and also nourished the Northeastern textile industry, creating a consumer society.

The uncompensated labor of millions of slaves played a central role in building the economic and cultural foundations of our country. The debate over reparations may now give us an opportunity to learn how much African Americans contributed to making a nation that continues to attract untold millions of immigrants.

David Brion Davis is director of Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. His book The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction.